â€œOn the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.â€ —Van Jones, on his resignation as Green Jobs “Czar”

Jones was a longtime community organizer in the Bay Area. He is the founding president of Green for All, the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the co-founder of the group Color of Change. His bookÂ The Green Collar Economy was a national bestseller. Time Magazine recently named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Such an impressive curriculum vitae certainly did not escape the notice of another former community organizer, the current occupant of the White House, Barack Obama.Â In March, President Obama tapped Jones to be a special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

So how come everyone didnâ€™t live happily ever after?

The Marxists have an answer: Glenn Beck and Fox News.

The â€œvicious smear campaignâ€ (Jonesâ€™ words) permeating the Fox News Channel and the relentless hammering by Glenn Beck made it impossible for Jones to do the job he was selected by the president to do:

AMY GOODMAN: â€¦ for the past month Fox News has run a series of reports on Jonesâ€™s alleged association with communists and for signing a petition calling for a congressional probe into the actions of the Bush administration around the 9/11 attacks.

An â€œalleged associationâ€ with communists? Nice try. These were no mere allegations, and a perusal of previous NewsReal posts on the subject will put that myth to bed.

What we will focus on here, however, is the amazing realization that Goodman and her comrades never saw this coming and were blindsided by the resignation! How could this have happened? After all, Goodman reported, Jones had apologized for calling Republicans â€œBLANK-holesâ€ during a February speech. He even denied being a 9/11 â€œTruther.â€ He was even re-casting himself as a reasonable man. And yet the attacks continued, reaching critical mass when â€œconservative voices against his White House appointment reached a crescendo this weekend.â€

What has also shaken the Marxists is the fact that the White House let Jones use his own rope to hang himself, not raising a finger to come to his defense. This from Goodmanâ€™s interview yesterday with James Rucker, executive director of ColorOfChange.org:

AMY GOODMAN: Are you critical of the White House for not standing up for him or not accepting his resignation?

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, I am. And the reason is, Beck himself has said, and Fox has made clear, that they will go on such witch hunts if they can keep doing it. And when you haveâ€”when you respond to what Beck has done by essentially trying to be silent, it doesnâ€™t work. And when you respond by allowing your folks to leave, itâ€™s basically not only rewarding bad behavior, it also sends a message that, hmmm, maybe something was wrong with Van Jones, which I know that the administration doesnâ€™t think. I think everyone who knows Van who understands the situation doesnâ€™t think that.

Glenn Beck, Fox News (and, of course NewsReal) are guilty of one thing: they gave the country the truth about Van Jones. And in this case, the truth has set us free.